


The Thing

by mrs_d



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (sort of), 5+1 Things, Birthday, Christmas, Everyone is Poly Because Natasha, Hanukkah, Light Smut, Multi, Polyamory, Seasonal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:04:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8880526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrs_d/pseuds/mrs_d
Summary: The thing about being married to Tasha is that she never gives straight answers. (And Sharon doesn’t care if Steve’s the only other person to laugh at that; it’s funny.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Characters and relationships are listed in alphabetical order; each gets more or less equal screen time. (I just really wanted a fic where everyone loves Natasha, okay?)
> 
> Thanks [i-will-not-be-caged](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelheather/pseuds/iwillnotbecaged) for beta!

_Sharon_

The thing about being married to Tasha is that she never gives straight answers. (And Sharon doesn’t care if Steve’s the only other person to laugh at that; it’s funny.)

“What should we do for _your_ birthday?” Sharon asks in October.

They’re cleaning up after a dinner party, a late celebration of Sam’s birthday, since he and Bucky had been out of the country on the actual date. Steve offered to stay behind and help out, but Sharon could tell from the way that he was standing, with his hands shoved in his pockets, that it was more or less an empty gesture; he’d been intolerable for the week that his husband had been gone, and he wanted to get him home pronto. So Sharon kissed him and smacked his tiny ass on its way out the door while Natasha said goodbye to Bucky and Sam. Then they headed back into the kitchen and started gathering up dishes.

Tasha shrugs, scrapes birthday cake icing off a plate into the trash can. Sharon watches her out of the corner of her eye as she rinses the glasses and loads them into the dishwasher, but eventually she has to conclude that Tasha’s just not going to say anything else.

“You okay?” she asks.

Natasha smiles briefly, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m good.”

“Tasha,” Sharon murmurs, but Natasha’s already turned away, stacking plates and carrying them over to the sink.

“Sorry,” Tasha says. Her smile is a little more genuine this time. “I guess I’m just tired.”

“This can wait,” Sharon decides. She wipes her hands on the towel hanging on the oven door. “If you want to just go to bed, we can clean up in the morning.”

Tasha seems to hesitate before shaking her head. “We don’t have to.”

“Come on,” Sharon insists.

She takes Tasha’s hand and leads them out of the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall to the bedroom, hitting light switches as they go. When she’s finally got Tasha in the bedroom, she reaches for the lamp, but Tasha stops her.

“Thanks,” she says, and she kisses her.

It catches Sharon off-guard, Natasha’s tongue coaxing Sharon’s lips open, sexy and sloppy. Tasha kisses her like she’s water in the desert, and within minutes, Sharon’s completely breathless. She has enough time to think, _This is a very good distraction technique_ before Tasha’s undressing her, unzipping her pink party dress and sliding it down over her shoulders, kissing and nipping at the skin underneath.

Sharon loses track of Tasha’s hands, but her bra tightens for one second before it springs open and then it’s gone, hitting the floor almost silently, and Tasha is cupping her breasts, her thumbs drawing circles around Sharon’s nipples.

“Tasha,” Sharon murmurs again, but the word gets lost. Tasha’s lips are honey, her tongue whiskey, and Sharon gets a little lost, too, for a moment before she remembers that this is the point, that Natasha wants to avoid a topic of conversation.

She pulls back, as gently as she can, and touches the bedside lamp to turn it on, low. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Natasha says immediately. She dives in for another kiss, but Sharon pulls back.

Tasha sighs. She meets Sharon’s eyes for a few seconds before she looks away again. “My birthday,” she says finally. “I— we don’t have to do anything.”

“But is there something you want to do?” Sharon asks, knowing that sometimes it’s all about asking the right questions.

“Maybe,” Tasha replies after a long pause. “I don’t know.”

“We don’t have to make a decision right this minute,” Sharon reminds her. “You can think about it, decide what you’d like.”

Tasha ducks her head, smiling. It’s a surprisingly shy gesture, and Sharon knows that she’d never show this much vulnerability in front of the guys.

“Thanks,” she says again. “Can I go back to kissing you now?”

Sharon takes a few steps forward, nudging Tasha back to the bed until she sits. Sharon bends, undoes Natasha’s dress as she kisses her, and pulls it down with her as she sinks to her knees. She breathes in Tasha’s soft, familiar scent and starts dropping kisses along her inner thigh, working her way up.

“Actually,” she says, and Tasha takes in a sharp breath. “I’ve got a better idea....”

 

_Steve_

The thing about being best friends with Nat, and sharing lovers with her, is that her birthday’s on Christmas Eve, which makes celebrations a little... complicated. Steve knows what it’s like to share a birthday with a holiday, and, even though Sam and Sharon are the only ones with outside family commitments, Steve still doesn’t want Nat to feel overlooked.

“We should do something special for Nat’s birthday this year,” he tells Sharon one night, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving.

They’re cuddled close together in bed, naked under the sheets, still warm from their long, luxurious shower, and Sharon smells like her favorite cucumber lotion.  

After a lengthy pause, Sharon lifts her head a fraction of an inch. “Yeah?” she mumbles.

“Sorry,” Steve whispers, kissing her temple. “Forgot you were almost asleep.”

Sharon’s laugh is just a brush of air against Steve’s chest. “Yeah, well, not all of us have your stamina. I was barely standing after one round, let alone two.”

Steve smiles, feeling his cheeks heat with pleased embarrassment. Sharon sagging into his arms in the shower after they brought each other off with their hands — that’s something to cherish, and it’s why they took their time after, why he insisted on working the lotion into all the corners of her body before going down on her. She asked him to fuck her after, and he did, slowly and sweetly.

Sharon moves against him, stretching her legs and rocking her hips. He can feel her, hot and wet next to his thigh, but it’s not arousing, just intimate.

“Love you,” he murmurs into her hair.       

“You too,” she replies. She draws a breath, and she sounds more awake when she asks, “What should we do? For Tasha, I mean.”

“Well, do you know what she wants to do?”

Sharon snorts. “Don’t go there.”

Steve nods, sympathetic. “Interrogating Natasha Romanov never seems to end well.”

“Nope,” Sharon agrees. “But she did say— or, well, I got the impression that she thinks it’d be nice to go out as a group. Maybe we could catch a show or something.”

“A show?” Steve repeats, with some trepidation. He hasn’t been to Broadway since he was a guest of honor at that embarrassing Captain America musical two summers ago.

“Oh, stop, it won’t be that bad,” Sharon tells him. For someone who claims to have no enhanced abilities, Steve’s pretty sure she’s a mind reader. “I’ll research it, find us a good one.”

“Are you sure that’s what she wants?” Steve asks. “Because what if—”

“Steve,” Sharon stops him. Her brown eyes are locked on his. “Trust me. I know my wife.”

Steve feels a surge of affection; he loves the way Sharon takes charge. “Okay, I trust you.” 

“Good,” Sharon replies. She pecks him on the lips before settling back against his chest. “Plus, she gave me a few hints.”

“What are they?” Steve asks.

Sharon’s forehead wrinkles, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, she starts humming. “Dum, dum, DAH-dah-dum, dum DAH-dum-dum-dum, DAH-dum.”

Steve can’t help it; he laughs. “What?”

Sharon’s tune breaks off as she starts giggling as well. “I don’t know! She won’t stop singing that song.”

“I didn’t know Natasha could sing,” Steve remarks, still chuckling.

“Me neither! But she keeps singing it, and it keeps getting stuck in my head. Every time I ask her what the song is, she just does that eyebrow thing.”

“Ah, the eyebrow thing,” Steve says warmly. “All right, so once we figure out that song, we’ll have an idea of what she wants for her birthday.”

“In theory,” Sharon says with a short sigh. “Be a lot easier if she’d just tell me.”

Steve holds her a little tighter and kisses her head again. “Leopard can’t change its spots,” he murmurs into her hair. “We’ll figure it out, give her an amazing birthday.”

Sharon hums happily. “Okay.”

They lie together a little longer in silence. Steve’s breathing evens out as Sharon’s does, and he’s almost asleep when the idea hits him.

“Google,” he says.

“Huh?” says Sharon.

“We’ll search the song. On Google.”

Sharon lifts her head, does the eyebrow thing that she clearly learned from her wife, and Steve realizes what he just said.

“Oh. Right,” he mumbles, feeling himself blush again. “Hard to do that without a title.”

“Or lyrics,” Sharon agrees. “I mean, I could type in _dum, dum, DAH-dah-dum_ , but I don’t think it would go very well.” She pats his chest and lies down again. “But nice try. Very 21st century of you.”

“Well, you know me,” Steve says, running his hand up and down her back. “I’m a 21st century kind of guy.”

 

_Sam_

The thing about dating the Black Widow is that she never plans ahead. In the field, she makes Steve’s _Gonna need a ride_ look like a five-point briefing. Sometimes Sam has to ask three times before she tells him where she needs him to pick her up, and today it’s on the other side of something that’s exploding.

“You know, you could make this a little easier on me,” he says over the noise, trusting that she’ll hear him through the communicator.

“I didn’t know it was gonna blow,” she protests. “And I thought you didn’t like it when I went easy on you, Wilson.”

Sam just shakes his head. He can feel the heat creeping up on his back as he drops to the pavement, opens his arms and helps Nat strap herself in. They take off, and there’s another detonation inside the building, quieter and more contained.

“Okay, that one I knew about,” Natasha adds.

“Anything else you need to tell me?” Sam asks dryly.

“You have beautiful eyes,” Nat says.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Outside the field, she isn’t much better. Getting Natasha to commit to something in advance is a bit of a challenge. Not like she’s ever stood Sam up or anything; Sam’s just had to accept that their dates tend to be a little spontaneous.

And God help him if he’s trying to plan her a birthday party.

“Just a small one,” he says, the first week of December. He knows he sounds like he’s begging, and he doesn’t care. “Maybe even just the five of us, for dinner, like we did with my birthday.”

Natasha sets down the brochure she was reading, something with ballerinas all over it. Sam can tell from her face that she’s not convinced by his plan. “But then we have to stay in. What if there’s something better we’d like to go to?”

“Okay, then we’ll go out,” Sam replies. “It doesn’t matter what we do, just so long as we’re doing it together.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows, licks her lips. “Doing it together, huh?”

Sam blinks, taken aback. “Do— do you want birthday sex? Like, with all of us? Because I’m game, but Steve—”

“Ew, no,” Natasha laughs. “God, no. Not that.”

“Okay, then,” Sam says, nodding briskly. He has to admit he’s a little relieved. “Cross that off the list of possibilities.”

Natasha is still laughing, but she steps close, runs her fingers up Sam’s forearms. Everywhere she touches tingles.

“Don’t cross anything off the list of possibilities,” she says softly, and Sam thinks she could probably make the phone book sound sexy. “I want to leave my options wide open.”

“And I want to celebrate you,” Sam insists. He tugs her closer, settles his hands on her lower back and dips his head to kiss her lips. “Why won’t you let me?”

And Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow, ever the mystery, murmurs something in Russian before she’s kissing Sam back, climbing up into his arms, and erasing the question from his mind.

 

_Bucky_

The thing about loving Natalia is that she’s really, _really_ good in bed.

She says that they never did this before, that it wasn’t like this when they were both weapons in someone else’s cache, but her memory has holes, same as his, and Bucky would swear his body remembers this, remembers her flexibility, the way she can hold her leg up, exactly like a dancer, so he can slide all the way in, so deep and tight, just perfect. And then her eyes open, and she calls his name — not Bucky, not James, but Yasha, the secret name she gave him years ago — and he’s lost, he’s falling, and she catches him with quiet presses of her lips to his sweaty forehead, with fingers in his hair and whispers in his ear.

She lowers her leg, rolls over while he gathers himself. “Seems like you needed that,” she comments after a long moment.

She’s speaking Russian — the two of them could swap languages all day — so he answers in kind. “It’s been a little while.”

“Hm,” Natasha says. “Been busy.”

“Almost the holidays,” Bucky agrees. “Do we know what we’re doing yet?”

“Steve and Sam have Sam’s family Christmas, and I’m going to Sharon’s parents for dinner on the first night of Hanukkah.” She pauses, presses close to his side. “You’re welcome to join me.”

Bucky frowns, thinking. Somewhere, way back in his mind, there’s a familiar tug. Candles, food, laughter. Family. Hanukkah meant something to him once. But what it meant is vague, more like glimpses into someone else’s life than memories of his own.

“I’ll think about it,” he answers finally. Natasha seems willing to accept that, but he changes the subject just in case. “What about your birthday? Are we doing anything?”

“Everyone’s been asking me that,” Natasha sighs.

“Only because we love you so much,” Bucky half-teases. He kisses her temple, inhales the scent of her hair. “What do you want to do?”

Natasha slides away from him, stretches that perfect body until she’s standing. She raises herself to the tips of her toes and brings her arms up over her head. It’s a ballerina’s pose, but there’s nothing fragile about it; somehow she looks just as deadly like this, naked in his bedroom, as she would with her weapons. She is a weapon, after all. Same as him.

She continues her stretches in silence, and Bucky begins to think that maybe she doesn’t want to talk anymore. This thought is reinforced when she makes her way back up the bed to sit on his face. He stifles a laugh as he slips his tongue out, tasting himself on her skin, and above him, she makes a sound halfway between a sigh and moan.

Definitely no more talking tonight.

 

_Steve_

The thing about their arrangement is that sometimes they have to get together and talk things out as a group. They’re informal gatherings, usually tacked on to the end of a mission debrief. Steve joked once and called it a family meeting, but everyone except Sharon groaned and threw things at him, so that never happened again. Now he just settles on the couch with Sam at his side and lets her lead.

Today’s a little different because they aren’t coming off a mission, and Nat isn’t here. Sharon, however, is in charge as ever.

“Where are we at with Tasha’s birthday? We only have one week, people.”

“Party’s out,” Sam reports. “She said she’s cool celebrating in January instead.”

“But we’d rather not, if we can help it,” Steve adds.

“Noted,” says Sharon. “Buck? What have you got?”

Bucky’s frowning, his face crumpled up in concentration. “Her birthday’s in a week?” he says blankly.

Steve’s heart contracts like it does every time he’s reminded that Bucky’s mind isn’t what it used to be. He used to be better at remembering birthdays than Steve was, but now—

Sam scoffs and shoves Bucky’s shoulder. “That amnesiac bit is getting old, Barnes. I fell for it with the milk in your fridge, but....”

Bucky laughs, and Steve realizes what’s happened. “You asshole,” he mutters, even as the relief washes through him.

“Boys. Can we focus, please?” Sharon cuts in.

“Sorry,” Steve says meekly. Bucky and Sam straighten up at once, which is a skill Steve will have to get Sharon to teach him.

“It’s just that I know there’s something she wants, and she won’t come out and say it,” Sharon goes on.

“Of course not. She was never allowed,” Bucky says softly.

There’s a little silence. Sam squeezes his thigh, and Sharon nods.

“But she’s left hints,” Steve volunteers, hoping to lighten the mood. “That song—”

Sharon starts humming the song she’d sung for Steve a month ago. “Dum, dum, DAH-dah-dum, dum DAH-dum-dum-dum, DAH-dum.”

“I know that tune,” Sam says thoughtfully. “Why do I know that tune?”

“Because it’s Tchaikovsky,” Bucky tells him. “The overture to Opus 71, more commonly known as the score to _The Nutcracker_ ballet.”

“How do you know that?” Steve asks incredulously.

Bucky shoots him a dry look. “Because I’m civilized.”

Steve rolls his eyes. Sharon rolls hers back. “Yeah, right,” Sam mutters.

“Here,” says Bucky. He fiddles with his phone, and classical music starts piping out of the speaker. It matches — more or less — what Sharon’s been humming. “Told you.”

As the music plays, Sam shifts beside Steve on the couch, wriggling around until he works a rumpled pamphlet out of his pocket.

“Nat left this at our place,” he tells Steve as he opens it. “I wonder— yep,” he says, pointing down. “The New York City Ballet is putting on _The Nutcracker_ this year. Opening night is tomorrow, it runs till January 5 th.”

“That’s it, then,” Sharon declares. Steve looks up, she’s grinning. “That’s what she wants for her birthday.”

Steve can’t help sharing her joy. “So she gave you the tune, and she gave Sam the pamphlet,” he says. “What clue did she give you, Buck?”

Bucky’s cheeks redden. “Nothing,” he mumbles.

“Oh, come on,” Sam encourages him, nudging his shoulder again. “She had to give you something.”

“I’ll, uh, tell you later, Sam,” says Bucky, his lips twitching.

Steve feels his face get warm as he catches on. He and Sharon exchange a quick, awkward look.

“Anyway,” Sharon says pointedly, “let’s put Steve in charge of tickets.”

“What?” Steve sputters, distracted from his embarrassment. “Why?”

“Tickets have been sold out for months,” Sharon tells him, holding up her phone as proof, even though Steve can’t read the tiny print at this distance. “But you’re Captain America.”

“So?”

“Stevie, come on, you can’t really be this dense, can you?” asks Bucky. “All you have to do is call them up and say pretty please, and boom. Five seats, no problem. Anything for an American hero.”

“That’s not really fair,” Steve starts, but Sam cuts him off.

“Plus you got money, babe, and money talks.”

“I still don’t think—”

“Steve,” says Sharon, with an edge to her voice that Steve tries not to find sexy. “Would you rather call Tony and ask for a favor?”

Steve blinks. “Nope. I’m good.”

“Atta boy,” says Bucky, and Sharon and Sam just laugh as Steve digs out his phone and dials the number on the pamphlet right away.

 

_Natasha_

They file into the row, Bucky first, then Sharon, then Nat, Sam, and Steve. Her boys are in tuxes, her wife in a slinky white gown, with diamonds in her ears to match the one on her finger. She runs her thumb over that diamond, the symbol of their commitment to one another, even as Sam kisses her cheek.

“Good birthday?” he murmurs.

“Best,” she agrees.

The thing about having a wife, two boyfriends, and a best friend, Natasha thinks as the orchestra plays and the curtain rises on her favorite ballet, is that they always know just what she’s thinking.


End file.
